Feedback on the book – dealing with Amazon reviews

We really do appreciate our readers taking the time and effort to write reviews of our book. We actively encourage feedback and this is presented in the book on how to do this. As we maintain a very active GitHub repository of a complete working OpenStack environment, code and examples – we positively encourage people to give us feedback so we can improve our code and writing.

UPDATE: The reviewer contacted us to say how happy he was to have his concerns addressed and as a result, the review has been removed. Thank you. I have removed references to emails so this post offers a guide to future reviewers on how to give us feedback.

The problem with reviews is that it tends to be a one-sided conversation though, with us only being able to respond to the damage that has already been done. We were recently alerted to a 2-star Amazon review [Edit: Now removed] that contradicted conversations that I’d had with the reviewer. We thought the best way to address this was by explaining why the review is incorrect. A rebuttal 5-star review by an author would help fix the ratings – as people do judge Amazon books by the star ratings – but would be false and equally damaging.

Fortunately in this incident, I had a 2-way conversation with this reviewer. It started on Twitter then progressed to email.

The first issue was to raise awareness around syntax used in the book and the use of under_scores and not hyphen-ated flags.

This is perfectly valid syntaxas shown below:

The example used in the review incorrectly asserts that the syntax we used is not valid. This is also mythbusted below too:

The second issue was that of the Kindle version introducing extra spaces in the syntax. In the PDF there are no such spaces:

How to give feedback

Please contact any of us on Twitter, or email book @ openstackbook.com, fill in bug information on GitHub regarding the environment and scripts not working, or directly with the Publisher. You can follow us and comment on G+ and you can like or post messages on Facebook. You can even leave a comment below.